One of way sellers can promote a product to a customer is to demonstrate the product or the effects of the product to the consumer.
For this, the seller has multiple tools available to him. Of those, one is to describe the product or its effect to the consumer, either by oral or written form, possibly helped by pictures or advertisement support, such as for medical drugs, for example or technical notes in a sport shop. Another tool is to illustrate the advantages of the product, either using a video, or by using a demonstrator. Demonstrators generally use a specific product, or part of the product, and propose to use it in a mock situation that enables to show the advantage of the product. Finally, another tool available to the seller is to enable the customer to try or sample the product before buying it. It is often the case for books, clothes, shoes, perfumes, or even televisions or computer screens that are displayed to the customer.
In the ophthalmic industry, the sellers, and especially eye-care-professionals, ECP hereafters, which want to sell a product for prescription glasses, which have given prescription, do not have access to all those tools. In that cases, products refers to the material of the lenses, a particular optical design versus another one or even the different added values: the possibility of coloration, of having photochromic or polarized treatments, of having anti-fog or anti-smudge coatings, of having anti-scratches, anti-shock, or antistatic treatments, of having anti-reflective treatments, anti-UV antireflective treatments, blue-protection anti-reflective treatments.
Prescription glasses have a prescription that is specific to the customer that order lenses. In general, the customer chooses frames, and the different products or options he desires for his/her lenses and then the ECP order lenses which have an optical function corresponding to the wearer and his/her prescription and which further have all the ordered options.
Accordingly, if the seller wanted to let the customer try a specific product in real-life conditions, with the personalized prescription, the seller would need either to have in stock all possible prescriptions with all possible combinations of options or allow the customer to buy the ordered glasses “on trial,” with the expensive risk of the customer returning glasses, and thus lenses, that are custom-made and thus that cannot be sold to another customer.
Thus when an ECP wants to sell an option on a lens, he only has available descriptions, videos and demonstrators. Demonstrators, in this case, encompasses equipments designed to make highlight the behavior of an option on a lens that is not the final lens, and is often a plano-lens, i.e., a lens with an optical function of zero dioptry (0.00 D).
There is thus an interest to provide a simple solution for trial optical added values.